Davemichels

He came to the high-profile collaboration startup from Google and Pinterest.

Jason Shellen, who has done stints at both Pinterest and Google, has left Slack, where he was head of product for its platform efforts, said sources. He only joined the San Francisco-based startup at the beginning of the year.

Shellen was charged with getting all kinds of services and automation, called Slackbots, on Slack from partners to help businesses and to make its ecosystem robust. At an event this summer, Shellen said in an interview that the goal was to make Slack “the place where work happens.”

Slack has made a big deal of its platform road map, including the creation of an $80 million fund to encourage the development of more third-party apps and bots to make the service more useful to teams. But the company, which has had several acquisition offers from larger players, is facing increased competition from those very same companies now.

At Google, Shellen was best known for his work on Google Reader, the RSS feed product. He has also worked at AOL via Thing Labs. It’s not clear if he is going anywhere.

Shellen is not the only top exec to leave Slack, which has been valued at $3.8 billion. Its CMO/CRO Bill Macaitis left in November, along with its HR head Anne Toth.

I pinged Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield about the departure, but got no reply.

UPDATE: A Slack spokesperson confirmed the departure after I posted this news. “He wound down his time at the company in late December to pursue a path closer to his entrepreneurial roots,” said the spokesperson. Also, Shellen said the same on Twitter.

This video shoes how Tesla's autopilot could save your life. The Tesla's front collision warning alerts the driver and breaks the car a full second before the oncoming crash even happens.

Video by Hans Noordsij

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Amazon has been working on getting a drone delivery program off the ground for a while now, but some new patents show the company isn't out of wild ideas. As TechCrunch reports, Zoe Leavitt, an analyst for CB Insights, has discovered a recent Amazon patent for an "airborne fulfillment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery" — i.e., a giant flying drone mothership zeppelin warehouse.

The patent envisions the airborne fulfillment center (AFC) in the form of a giant airship, that would fly at high...

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Long-distance relationships are difficult because not only is your lover completely removed from your day-to-day life, but you have absolutely zero possibility of tangible physical intimacy. This is sad. Researchers from the Imagineering Lab at City University London think they can solve this problem, however, with their new Kissenger gadget. The device mimics a real kiss using pressure sensors and actuators. It’s purely for regular pecks on the cheek or mouth — no tongue simulation is available. Sorry.

The Kissenger pairs with a messaging app that lets a user send a kiss, so when one is sent, the Kissenger measures pressure on different parts of the sender’s lips to replicate that exact kiss on the recipient’s Kissenger. The lip part of...

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Fifty-year-olds, take notice: In a few decades you might have a robot roommate taking care of you.

In conjunction with Rice University, IBM is developing a series of sensors that can someday live inside a robot interface to help senior citizens stay safe.

Susanne Keohane, senior technologist at IBM Research, says the project addresses a growing need for technology that helps aging populations preserve both their independence and their overall health, while also avoiding disruption in their daily lives.

"If you slap an Apple Watch on an 88-year-old, that's not feasible for most 88-year-olds," Keohane tells Business Insider. "That's just not in their world."

Keohane says technology must be wholly intuitive for senior citizens to use it on a regular basis. As designers say, it must be "frictionless." IBM has tried to achieve that goal by developing sensors that detect changes in motion, scent, and audio, all of which could indicate a potentially dangerous scenario for elders living alone.

The prototype robot for this solution is the IBM Multi-Purpose Eldercare Robot Assistant (IBM MERA), which the company has been testing at its "Aging in Place" lab based in Austin, Texas. The lab was designed to mimic experiences seniors have in their own home.

Sensors can detect when the stove's burners are on, or when a person has fallen down. Even in its prototype stage, MERA is equipped with cameras to read facial expressions, sensors to capture vital signs, and Watson-powered speech recognition to know when to call for help.

MERA isn't available to consumers yet. Keohane says the company still has a lot of research to do before it begins to think about bringing the robot to market. IBM also wants the robot to enter each person's home already chock-full of important information, and to do that requires collecting it first.

"In the near-term, it would be more of the ambient sensors in the home starting to gather all of this data," Keohane says. Then a robot could come in and download those batches of data to "learn" about its resident.

Keohane suspects a country like Japan, where aging has become a national concern, will be the first to adopt such a robot (in fact, robots for the elderly are already popping up there). For the first time since data was collected in 1899, Japan saw fewer than 1 million births in 2016. Meanwhile, the country has millions of seniors, 65,000 of whom over the age of 100.

Where young people are missing, robots could step in to save the day.

SEE ALSO: 5 books the head of MIT Media Lab thinks you should read

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NOW WATCH: This machine solves the most time-consuming things about doing laundry

Docks are finally getting their chance to shine after Apple nixed all the ports on its new MacBooks Pros and instead opted for only Thunderbolt. Suddenly, we love our ports. Don’t take our ports! Luckily for us, the wheels of capitalism have already started turning to satisfy our port needs. There’s OWC’s Thunderbolt 3 dock, for instance, and something called the Line Dock on Indiegogo. Now, Lenovo, too, is getting into the game with its Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C docks that it introduced today. These docks are designed for the modern day office worker, like all of Lenovo’s ThinkPad products.

The ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock includes two DisplayPort ports, HDMI, VGA, five USB 3.0 ports— one of which is always powered — Gigabit Ethernet, a...

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The average American spends 38 hours a year stuck in traffic — or 90 hours a year if you live in LA.

Those numbers get worse in the world's megacities: Commuters in Mexico City, Moscow, and Beijing can sit in traffic for hours every day. Here are a few gripping images of those journeys.

Drake Baer and Alex Davies contributed to an earlier version of this article.

SEE ALSO: 10 of the most incredible home libraries around the world

Thousands of people commute to work in Bangladesh by boat. Here, residents of Dhaka take out their umbrellas.

The security checks during rush hour in Beijing make for insanely long lines. The checks have been tightened due to an attack in China's Xinjiang region, where dozens were killed in May 2014.

It doesn't get much easier once you're actually on the train.

If you're feeling down about 2016, maybe a look at the data can help.

Over at the site Our World in Data, economist Max Roser has been putting together a compendium of charts and briefs that reveal  the state of our world.

Roser's data tell an uplifting story. The world is the safest, richest, most connected, and most highly-educated it's ever been.

Here are some of the most uplifting charts to carry your spirits into the new year.

SEE ALSO: 18 giant infrastructure projects that could reshape the world

Life expectancy is one of the most visible signs of humanity's progress. Thanks largely to safer childbirth practices, the average age in many countries has shot up from 40 years in 1838 to over 80 years today.

Child mortality rates have fallen considerably within the last 150 years, particularly as doctors improved their delivery procedures and vaccines began limiting the risk of fatal disease.

The world is collectively getting richer. While roughly 1.3 billion people still live in extreme poverty, quality of life is rising for billions more.

• Apple launched the first iPhone 16 years ago, in January 2007.
• Compared to the latest batch of iPhones, the first version seems downright primitive. 
• Here's how it looked, and what it could do.

Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone to the world 16 years ago.

It was a revelation.

Before Apple's most popular product came out, smartphones were clunky devices — half keyboard and half screen. Full websites didn't run on mobile phones, so companies were forced to build weak, mobile versions of their sites.

The iPhone changed all that.

And yet, the typical smartphone experiences we enjoy today didn't happen overnight. It took years of Apple adding feature upon feature. By today's standards, the original iPhone was a primitive brick.

As a reminder of how far the iPhone has come, we've put together this slideshow.

Jay Yarow contributed to an earlier version of this story.

Yes, the original iPhone was a revelation. Here's what the competition looked like at the time:

That said, it's fun to look back and see how many now-common features were missing from the original iPhone.

It ran on "EDGE," or 2G wireless, which is painfully slow. It's basically as slow as home internet was before high-speed broadband.

That 2G connection was extra painful because AT&T was the only carrier option available. And AT&T had its problems (like dropped calls).

The screen itself measured just 3.5 inches, a far cry from the 6.7-inch screen of the most advanced model so far, the iPhone 14 Pro Max.

There was no App Store when the iPhone launched.

Beyond the touchscreen and sleek design, the defining concept of modern smartphones is apps. Unbelievably, when Apple first launched the iPhone it had no App Store.

Steve Jobs wasn't sure if he wanted to have one because of his desire to totally control the experience. Eventually, he relented. And it's a good thing he did, because Apple's App Store set the standard for how to extend smartphone functionality. 

Hopefully you liked a black background, because that was the only choice! That's right: You couldn't change the wallpaper on the first iPhone.

It took three years for Apple to add copy and paste.

The first iPhone required a computer to set it up. It was another five years before Apple cut the cord.

Want to text message in landscape mode? The first iPhone couldn't do that.

Want to send a picture? The first iPhone also couldn't do that over text message. We've come a long way from basic text messages to the bizarre disco that is modern iMessage.

There were no turn-by-turn directions apps — no Google Maps! It's not just that Apple didn't have turn-by-turn — it didn't let other app developers do it for years, either.

The camera was just 2 megapixels, so it wasn't capable of taking the kind of gorgeous photos you expect out of modern iPhones. The camera also couldn't take videos. For comparison, the iPhone 14 Pro Max has a 48-megapixel camera system.

There was no notification center, no Siri, and no control center. These are all complex, nuanced features that are relatively recent additions to the iPhone — but it's still a reminder of how many huge features Apple has added since 2007.

And it cost $499 for a 4 GB model! The original iPhone topped out at 16 GB of storage. Today, storage on the iPhone 14 Pro Max begins at 128 GB and goes all the way up to 1 TB. (Quick reminder here that 1 terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes.)

So what?

The point here is that technology takes time to mature.

While the iPhone was a revelation when it was released, it still had a long way to go. The next time your favorite tech company releases a new product — especially if that new product is in a new category the way, say, smartphones were in 2007 — cut them some slack. Assuming the fundamental product vision is sound, the first version is just that: a starting point.

Amazon may be on a mission to fundamentally change grocery shopping, but not all retailers are racing to catch up.

The French grocery chain Monoprix recently released an ad promoting its service called livraison à domicile +, or home delivery plus.

The premise of the service is straightforward: you shop at a grocery store for all your necessities, debate whether to buy a guilt-laden cupcake, then leave your groceries with a cashier. You exit the store and head on your way schlep-free, and your groceries are hand-delivered by a human soon after. 

"No lines, no checkouts, no registers," the robot narrator in Monoprix's ad, which we first spotted on Quartz, boasts. 

Sound familiar? That's because it is. In fact, that line word-for-word mimics a recent ad from Amazon for its futurist shopping experience called Amazon Go. 

While Amazon's vision for the future of shopping relies on advanced technology like machine learning to know what items you place in your cart so you don't have to manually ring everything up on your way out, Monoprix brags that its system depends on the power of humans to get stuff done. It's a hilarious ad that begs you to ask, is technology making things needlessly confusing?

Watch Monoprix's ad here:

 And here's Amazon's original ad for Amazon Go:

SEE ALSO: This is Amazon's grocery store of the future: no cashiers, no registers, and no lines

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NOW WATCH: How to get a ton of food at Chipotle for under $5

2016 was the year that Facebook recognized the threat Snapchat poses to its core business, and started relentlessly cloning the app's core features. It makes sense considering Facebook unsuccessfully tried to acquire Snapchat in 2013; CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg.

The result is that Instagram, Messenger, Facebook's main app, and even WhatsApp look much more like Snapchat than they did one year ago. And Zuckerberg now believes that the future of how people communicate on Facebook will be through the camera — a concept Snapchat pioneered.

Here are all of the ways that Facebook copied Snapchat in 2016:

SEE ALSO: If you think it's crazy that Snapchat might go public, here's something to consider

The first indication that Facebook was wading into Snapchat's territory was in March when it acquired the app MSQRD, which lets you swap faces with goofy effects, similar to Snapchat's unique filters called "lenses."

Source: Business Insider

Then, in April, Facebook added scannable Snapchat-like QR codes for profiles in Messenger.

Source: Business Insider

Disappearing messages were added as a test to Messenger in May — a feature Facebook has yet to roll out globally.

Source: Business Insider

With so many companies getting caught up in the microservices hype, a post by Sean Kelly on the Basho Blog attempts to dispel five of the microservices myths that many developers and businesses have been sold on.

Nokia claims Apple is violating 32 of its technology patents.

Here's an easy way to infuriate a lot of people very quickly: Re-name your smartphone's Wi-Fi hotspot "Samsung Galaxy Note 7" and try and catch a flight.

The BBC reports that's exactly what happened on a flight from San Francisco to Boston this week. While the Virgin Airlines plane was mid-flight, cabin crew noticed that one of the available Wi-Fi networks was called "Samsung Galaxy Note7_1097."

The Galaxy Note 7 was, of course, the ill-fated Samsung smartphone that wouldn't stop exploding — destroying cars, burning children, and gutting hotel rooms — prompting the South Korean company to discontinue it entirely. Taking one on a plane in the US is now a federal crime.

Lucas Wojciechowski, a software engineer on the Virgin America flight, tweeted that an hour into the flight, the cabin crew made an announcement: "If anyone has a Galaxy Note 7, please press your call button."

This was followed up 15 minutes later with: "This isn't a joke. We're going to turn on the light," he tweeted, "and search everyone's bag until we find it."

Another 15 minutes later, and the captain came on the intercom — threatening to divert the plane and search it unless someone owned up. "I don't know if you've ever been diverted at 3am," the captain said, according to Wojciechowski's tweet. "Let me tell you, it is terrible. There is nothing open in the terminal. Nothing."

Luckily for the passengers, the (presumably sheepish) guilty party ultimately came forwards. "Ladies and gentlemen, we found the device. Luckily only the name of the device was changed to 'Galaxy Note 7'. It was not a GN7."

But the story doesn't end there.

Serenity Caldwell, a journalist who works at iMore, tweeted that when she arrived at the airport, she "found a huge line of people at the counter to my gate. Turns out, the flight had been cancelled." It took two hours for a replacement flight to be organised by the airline.

Why? She says a crew member said: "The plane was mid-flight when an attendant noticed a wifi hotspot. A Galaxy Note 7 Wifi hotspot."

So yeah. It's an quick way to spoil Christmas for several hundred people. Don't do this.

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NOW WATCH: Here's why your iPhone has a tiny hole next to the camera

The world is full of unfathomably huge projects happening right under our noses.

Take the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, which will link three major Chinese cities in the country's quest to bring 42 million people together. Or Norway's plan to build the world's first fully-submerged floating tunnel to cut travel times between fjords in half.

Those efforts and many others illustrate how investing billions of dollars in enormous projects can collectively make the world a better place to live.

Here are some of the biggest projects the world has seen so far.

SEE ALSO: A floating school in Nigeria has collapsed after getting battered by heavy rain

Completed in September 2016, China's Pingtang telescope is now the world's largest radio telescope. Its dish measures 1,640 feet across and is capable of capturing signals more than 1,000 light-years from Earth.

After 17 years of construction, the Gotthard Base Tunnel opened in Switzerland on June 1, 2016. At 35 miles long, it's both the longest and deepest train tunnel in the world, offering unprecedented efficiency when traveling through the Alps.

The newly expanded Panama Canal was unveiled to the public in early June, 102 years after it first opened. It took $5.4 billion and 40,000 workers to triple the capacity of the waterway.

Jeremy Clarkson is no stranger to controversial statements.

Over the years he's offended everyone from truck drivers to the British Prime Minister.

The former host of the BBC's "Top Gear" is also a long-time automotive journalist and reviewer, with more than three-decades worth of experience.

Suffice to say, when Clarkson speaks, people listen.

In August, Clarkson revealed the cars he loved driving the most over the past year, through his weekly column in the Sunday Times.

His top 10 ranges from diesel SUVs to high-powered supercars. According to the bombastic TV personality, each of the cars he selected was able to stand out above the fray by making the driver "feel special" every time he or she climbs inside.

"A car must have something to elevate it from the norm. It may be speed, or cleverness, or the fizz, or styling to die for," The host of Amazon Prime's "The Grand Tour" wrote in his column.

"But there must be something. Something that makes you excited every time you climb inside. Because if it doesn’t, then it’s just a tool. And if it’s just a tool, you may as well use the bus."

Here's a closer look at a selection of Jeremy Clarkson's favorite cars from the past year.

Read Jeremy Clarkson's column on The Sunday Times »

SEE ALSO: These are the cars former 'Top Gear' host Jeremy Clarkson hated the most this year

Ferrari 488 GTB

The latest generation mid-engined supercar to emerge from Ferrari is the 488 GTB. And it's about as good as it gets.

"As a driving machine, it’s — there’s no other word — perfect," Clarkson wrote in his review.

The TV host loved the 488's thoroughbred racing technology, melodic engine note, and docile driving dynamics.

"When you drive a Ferrari 488 GTB round a corner on a racetrack, it doesn’t feel like a tool that you’re operating. Or even a comfy, well-fitting glove. It feels like an extension of your very self," he added.

The Ferrari 488 GTB received a total of four out of a possible five stars from Clarkson.

Mazda MX-5

In his review, Clarkson praised the all-new Mazda MX-5 for its joyful personality and driving dynamics. In fact, the Mazda proved to be so wonderfully lovable that Clarkson compared it to a cure for depression.

"The new one is better than ever. Because it’s so organic and raw and simple, it feels how a sports car should. It sings and fizzes and jumps about. It always feels eager and sprightly, and that makes you feel eager and sprightly too," he wrote.

Clarkson gave the MX-5 a full five stars.

Vauxhall Zafira Tourer

Your eyes have not deceived you. A Vauxhall Zafira Tourer with a diesel engine is one of Jeremy Clarkson's favorite cars.

(For those of us in the US, the Zafira is a small MPV/van produced in Germany by GM's European Division.)

Clarkson was impressed by the Zafira's strong turbo-diesel engine, good efficiency, and well-executed interior. But most of all, Clarkson was simply blown away by the Zafira's comfortable ride.

"And then I went over a speed hump and I simply didn’t feel a thing. Never in all my years in this business have I encountered any car — including the Rolls-Royce Phantom — that’s quite so good at refusing to transmit road surface irregularities into the cabin," he wrote in his review.

Naturally the Vauxhall Zafira Tourer received a full five stars from Clarkson.

As we approach the end of 2016, a number of people might be wondering whether there's some chance that the past year was just some sort of weird dream.

It turns out that if you ask the scientists whose job it is to probe the nature of reality, the answer is actually: Maybe.

Maybe everything that's happening is just a simulation being run on a computer by some smarter, higher order being (with a weird sense of humor).

Earlier this year, at the 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the esteemed panelists took a stab at explaining how we know about that question. Depending on whether you want reality to be real or not, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others.

Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said that she thought the odds that the universe isn't "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

A satisfying answer for those who don't want to sit there puzzling out what it would mean for the universe not to be real, to be sure.

But on the other hand, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

Uh-oh?

The question of whether we know that our universe is real has vexed thinkers going far back into history, long before Descartes made his famous "I think, therefore I am" statement. The same question has been explored in modern science-fiction films like "The Matrix" and David Cronenberg's "Existenz."

But most physicists and philosophers agree that it's impossible to prove definitively that we don't live in a simulation and that the universe is real.

Tyson agrees, but says that he wouldn't be surprised if we were to find out somehow that someone else is responsible for our universe.

One of the main arguments that physicists use to talk about what's known as the "simulation hypothesis" is that if we can prove that it's possible to simulate a universe — if we can figure out all the laws that govern how everything works, which physicists are trying to do — that makes it much more likely that it is actually simulated. If we know that it's possible to do something, it's much easier to think that thing is being done.

We haven't been able to figure out how to simulate a universe — yet. But it's not too hard to imagine that some other creature out there is far smarter than us.

Tyson points out that we humans have always defined ourselves as the smartest beings alive, orders of magnitude more intelligent than species like chimpanzees that share close to 99% of our DNA. We can create symphonies and do trigonometry and astrophysics — some of us, anyway.

But Tyson uses a thought experiment to imagine a life-form that's as much smarter than us as we are than dogs, chimps, or other terrestrial mammals.

"What would we look like to them? We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence," he says.

Whatever that being is, it very well might be able to create a simulation of a universe.

"And if that's the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just the creation of some other entity for their entertainment," Tyson says. "I'm saying, the day we learn that it is true, I will be the only one in the room saying, 'I'm not surprised.'"

And maybe that means there's some chance of doing a reset at some point.

Check out the full AMNH discussion on YouTube here:

This is an updated version of a post originally published in April of 2016.

SEE ALSO: The way we might protect ourselves from an exploding star could help us find alien civilizations

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NOW WATCH: Just because we haven’t found aliens doesn’t mean they haven’t found us

After a week-long feud with California regulators, Uber's self-driving car program is leaving the state after regulators delivered a death-blow to its self-driving car plans.

The cars left for Arizona on Thursday morning, where Uber will try to restart its self-driving car pilot, according to the company. 

“Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck. We’ll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we’re excited to have the support of Governor Ducey,” an Uber spokesperson said.

In a final blow to Uber's self-driving car ambitions in the state, the California DMV revoked the registration of Uber's 16 autonomous vehicles on Wednesday, forcing the company to shut down its self-driving pilot program in San Francisco.

"It was determined that the registrations were improperly issued for these vehicles because they were not properly marked as test vehicles," the DMV wrote in a letter to Uber on Wednesday.

The DMV's revocation of the vehicle registrations on Wednesday gives the California regulators the upper hand and settles the argument between the two in favor of the state. The disagreement began when Uber launched a new self-driving car pilot last week, similar to the program it's already running in Pittsburgh. But it didn't obtain the proper license from the DMV that is required by all self-driving carmakers.

Uber and the California DMV immediately started trading barbs over whether or not its car program should be permitted under California regulations. The DMV put out a statement saying that Uber "shall" get the permit to test its self-driving vehicles on public roads, but the company told Business Insider at the time that it had no plans whatsoever to apply for a permit since it didn't believe its cars fit the state's definition of autonomous vehicles.

Under the regulations, advanced autopilot systems, like Tesla's, are not regulated whereas Google's testing of its autonomous vehicle adheres to strict rules.

Instead of applying for the permit in California, the company has decided to leave the state with its cars altogether, piling them on the back of its self-driving truck. 

Arizona's governor called California's regulations "burdensome" and welcomed the ride-hailing company to the neighboring state.

“Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads. While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses," Arizona's governor Doug Ducey said in a statement. "Arizona is proud to be open for business. California may not want you, but we do.”

SEE ALSO: The man who invented the first self-driving motorcycle is leading Uber into the future

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NOW WATCH: Uber is shutting down its self-driving cars in San Francisco — here’s what it was like to ride in one

The magazine said the machines didn’t deliver the promised battery life.

Consumer Reports said Thursday that it can’t recommend Apple’s latest MacBook Pro line because of concern over the machines’ battery life.

It’s the first time the magazine has withheld a recommendation for one of the company’s laptops.

“The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another,” Consumer Reports said in a blog post.

The magazine said it tested three different models of the MacBook Pro that it bought at retail stores and found that battery life varied widely even on the same machine when used from one test to another. For example, it said that in its testing, the 13-inch model with Touch Bar lasted 16 hours in its first trial, 12.75 hours in a second and just 3.75 hours in its third test. Other models showed similar inconsistency.

The findings line up with customer complaints, the magazine said.

“Apple says that these computers should operate for up to 10 hours between charges, but some consumers in Apple’s support forums reported that they were only able to use their laptops for three to four hours before the battery ran down,” Consumer Reports said.

In a recent software update, Apple removed from the main display a clock icon that showed an estimate of remaining battery time amid complaints the figures varied widely from actual battery life.

An Apple representative wasn’t immediately available for comment, but told the magazine that customers with concerns should contact Apple’s customer support.

The battery issues are among several complaints users have had over the new design, with the other chief complaint being the lack of different ports on the machines, resulting in the need to use an adapter or dongle to connect everything from an iPhone to a flash drive.

Google was able to shave $3.6 billion from its 2015 tax bill by relying on an elaborate system of loopholes known as the “Double Irish" and “Dutch Sandwich,” according to a report from Bloomberg today. The loopholes — infamous among US corporations — effectively allow companies as large and profitable as Google to shuffle profits through subsidiaries in low-tax countries like the Netherlands and Ireland, and then onward to tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. In this case, Google moved $15.5 billion worth of euros to a Bermuda shell company, cutting its tax rate outside the US to 6.9 percent last year, according to regulatory filings in the Netherlands that were obtained by Bloomberg.

The structure of the Double Irish and...

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Twilio, the publicly-traded San Francisco communications tech company that powers text message notifications for companies like Netflix, Uber, and Coca-Cola Enterprises, closed trading on Wednesday at $34.59.

That's a full 15.61% higher than at the opening bell, giving the company a market cap of $3.09 billion.

That spike comes after Benzinga reported that Twilio is deepening its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the $13 billion cloud computing arm of the Amazon retail empire, which helps software developers build and run their apps under a pay-as-you-go model.

In July 2016, Twilio and AWS inked a deal for the company to power the text messaging services it offers to software developers; now, that will reportedly expand to include voice messaging, as well. That means that software developers building with AWS would be able to easily use Twilio to have their apps send audio clips or make phone calls.

For Twilio, that would mean access to Amazon Web Services' vast base of customers, which is what appears to be getting investors excited. Twilio tells Business Insider it has nothing to share at this time beyond its existing Amazon partnership, while Amazon has not yet responded to a request for comment.

However, the two companies are known to be close. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson gave a well-received keynote presentation at AWS's huge customer conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, in which he hinted that the partnership would be expanded with new collaborations announced "soon."

Still, Twilio has had a rough few months on the markets. When Twilio first debuted on the stock market at $15/share in June 2016, it took off like a rocketship, soaring up 90% in its first day of trading. But in late September, Twilio peaked at $68.97 and started sliding downwards — a slide that only accelerated when the company announced a secondary share sale.

For now, at least, Twilio is making up some lost ground: The stock is trading up around 1.5% in after-hours trading at the time of writing.

Here's the chart of Twilio's stock price from its June 2016 IPO to today:

SEE ALSO: This former Amazon manager is behind the breakout IPO of 2016 — and he says Amazon made it all possible

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NOW WATCH: Watch Amazon make its first drone delivery

On December 20, 1996, Apple announced that it bought computer and software company NeXT for roughly $400 million. It turned out to be the most important purchase in the company’s history.

That’s because it also brought back Steve Jobs, Apple's founder and former CEO who would reclaim the reigns of the Cupertino, California company just under a year later. The rest is well-known history: Jobs slashed away many of Apple’s failing ventures at the time, reinvigorated core businesses like the Mac, and introduced industry-changing smashes like the iPod, iPhone, and App Store, all while painting Apple as a lifestyle brand as much as a consumer tech company.

In case it wasn’t already obvious, this chart from Statista should put the anniversary’s significance into perspective: Apple’s revenue has skyrocketed from $7 billion to $216 billion in the last two decades, while its market cap has exploded enough to make the company most valuable in the world.

You’ll notice that bar went down in 2016, though. Today, five years after Jobs’ death, many onlookers see Apple as being at a crossroads. It remains a smartphone company at a time where smartphone growth has stagnated, its apps are generally unspectacular, the Apple Watch isn’t the next big thing some had hoped, and it’s aggravated many longtime Mac and iPhone users with the dongle madness of its newest devices.

Now, all eyes appear to be aimed at an overhauled 2017 iPhone and future AR glasses. 

SEE ALSO: Here are the countries with the fastest average internet speeds

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YouTuber (and CNN employee) Casey Neistat may have retired from daily vlogging, but he hasn’t quit making videos. His latest holiday video goes bigger than ever, with a giant, custom-made drone that’s capable of lifting and flying around an adult human being (in this case, Neistat, on a snowboard).

Neistat says the drone was customized for the video over the course of a year after being unable to find any commercially available drones for the project. The drone itself is an absolutely massive 16-rotor machine — which makes sense, given the weight it needs to be able to carry.

And while we’ve seen one-man drones capable of carrying people before, Neistat’s finished product offers a level of polish and practical use that...

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• General Electric is set to be booted from the Dow Jones industrial average and will be replaced by Walgreens Boots Alliance, the index's committee announced on Tuesday. 
• GE was the last-standing member of the 1896 Dow. It's been in and out of the index over the years.
• Today, the index is more diverse than the original list of industrial companies. 

General Electric is set to lose its place as the last-standing member of the 1896 Dow Jones industrial average. 

S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Tuesday that drug retailer Walgreens Boots Alliance would take the industrial conglomerate's place on June 26, to make the index more representative of the economy in 2018. Also, GE's stock had plunged by nearly 80% from its 2000 highs, and it accounted for less than 1% of the Dow's weight.  

Apple's addition to the current list of 30 American conglomerates, in March 2015, was yet another demonstration of how much the index has evolved. When it was founded in 1896, it consisted of a dozen industrial companies. 

Here they are:

SEE ALSO: What Wall Street is predicting for the stock market in 2016

American Cotton Oil Company

What it did: It formed as a trust after several mill owners in Texas and Arkansas combined syndicates to regulate the price of seeds. It became a corporation in 1889 after the trust was dissolved through a lawsuit.

Where it is now: It evolved into a company that became part of Unilever, the maker of consumer products including Dove soap and Lipton tea. The original company was dropped from the Dow in 1901.

Sources: Scripophily, Wikipedia

American Sugar Company

What it did: It was the largest American company in the sugar-refining business in the early 20th century, with investments in the Caribbean. It was established in 1891 with $50 million in capital.

Where it is now: It has since been acquired by American Sugar Refining Inc., whose products include Domino Sugar. It was dropped from the Dow in 1930.

Source: Wikipedia

American Tobacco Company

What it did: The American Tobacco Company acquired over 200 competitors to become the dominant player in the industry. It was founded in 1890.

Where it is now: The Supreme Court ordered it to dissolve following an antitrust lawsuit. It splintered into many smaller companies and renamed itself Fortune Brands. It was dropped from the Dow in 1985.

Source: Wikipedia

After we learned that Facebook had been filtering messages into a hidden inbox, we found 9 years' worth of unread messages dating back to 2007 — including some important ones.

Original Reporting by Sam Shead. Jenner Deal contributed reporting on a previous version of this article.

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Love it or hate it, if you ask someone whether they like "Seinfeld," you're going to get an opinion.

The iconic and polarizing show ran for 180 episodes and had a profound impact on TV. But to see which episodes are the biggest fan favorites, you usually have to resort to synthesizing a ranking from the "best of" lists floating around the internet and forums.

But now Hulu has decided to give us the hard numbers. The streaming service has the show's back catalog, and tracked which episodes were the most watched from 6/1/15 to 10/31/16.

The results probably won't come as a huge surprise. They're "all classics," as my colleague Steve Kovach put it. And it's true.

Here are the top 6 Seinfeld episodes of all time, according to Hulu, along with their descriptions:

No. 6 The Yada Yada (Season 8)

Jerry doubts his dentist’s religious conversion; Kramer and Mickey fight over a double date as Elaine undermines a couple’s chances at adoption.

No. 5 The Contest (Season 4)

Jerry challenges George, Kramer and Elaine to pool their money in a contest of self-denial. Meanwhile, an excited Elaine looks forward to her data with hunky John Kennedy, Jr.

No. 4 The Marine Biologist (Season 5)

Romance starts to blossom between George and his former college classmate Diane, after Jerry falsely tells her that George is a successful marine biologist.

No. 3 The Boyfriend (Season 3)

While performing his comedy act, Jerry meets Keith Hernandez (as himself), the former New York Mets all-star and one of Jerry’s favorite baseball players. But Jerry finds himself competing for his new pal’s time with Elaine, who has caught Keith’s eye.

No. 2 The Soup Nazi (Season 7)

A demanding soup stand chef bans Elaine from eating his wares.

No. 1 The Pitch (Season 4)

Jerry and George propose to write a television series. Newman blames Kramer for his speeding ticket; Jerry and George are offered a deal at NBC.

SEE ALSO: This chart shows how good Netflix is at making shows compared to rivals like HBO

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Alto is a way better email app than you’d expect to come from AOL in 2016. It’s better than any app you’d expect to come from AOL in 2016. Available on the web, Android, and iOS, Alto’s approach to email resembles that of CloudMagic and other email software that’s designed to simplify inbox management and show you important stuff first.

Alto’s stacks categorize your emails based on popular criteria (snoozed, messages from contacts, messages with files / photos, etc.) and the app’s cards put critical info — travel times, hotel bookings, OpenTable reservations, and so on — in front of you without actually requiring you to dig through the inbox. Like so:

Today the company announced that it’s adding Slack and Amazon Alexa integrations to...

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Yahoo has announced that "more than one billion user accounts" may have been stolen by hackers during an attack that took place in August 2013, according to a press release.

This is a separate hack than the one that Yahoo announced back in September, in which as many as 500 million user accounts were compromised.

"The company has not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft," Yahoo says, but that "the company has connected some of this activity to the same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the data theft the company disclosed on September 22, 2016."

With a billion accounts at risk, that would make this the biggest breach of all time — bigger than the Myspace breach of 360 million user accounts and 427 million passwords.

The breach could have implications for the $4.8 billion sale of Yahoo to Verizon, which has yet to close.

"As we’ve said all along, we will evaluate the situation as Yahoo continues its investigation," Verizon told CNBC.

Here's the entire message from Yahoo:

"Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has identified data security issues concerning certain Yahoo user accounts. Yahoo has taken steps to secure user accounts and is working closely with law enforcement.

"As Yahoo previously disclosed in November, law enforcement provided the company with data files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. The company analyzed this data with the assistance of outside forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, Yahoo believes an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts. The company has not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft. Yahoo believes this incident is likely distinct from the incident the company disclosed on September 22, 2016.

"For potentially affected accounts, the stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The investigation indicates that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system the company believes was affected.

"Yahoo is notifying potentially affected users and has taken steps to secure their accounts, including requiring users to change their passwords. Yahoo has also invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account.

"Separately, Yahoo previously disclosed that its outside forensic experts were investigating the creation of forged cookies that could allow an intruder to access users' accounts without a password. Based on the ongoing investigation, the company believes an unauthorized third party accessed the company's proprietary code to learn how to forge cookies. The outside forensic experts have identified user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were taken or used. Yahoo is notifying the affected account holders, and has invalidated the forged cookies. The company has connected some of this activity to the same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the data theft the company disclosed on September 22, 2016.

"Yahoo encourages users to review all of their online accounts for suspicious activity and to change their passwords and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which they use the same or similar information used for their Yahoo account. The company further recommends that users avoid clicking links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails and that they be cautious of unsolicited communications that ask for personal information. Additionally, Yahoo recommends using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password on Yahooaltogether.

Additional information is available on the Yahoo Account Security Issues FAQs page: https://yahoo.com/security-update.

SEE ALSO: Yahoo confirms major breach — and it could be the largest hack of all time

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